When applying for a newer job, the most essential element in your application is your resume. Your resume acts as your marketing tool, your personal advertisement. It is the first thing a recruiter reads before you are considered for an interview. These days, creating the perfect resume is challenging. You can’t just simply summarize your experiences and achievements on a few sheets of paper and call it a day. With a greater focus on electronic readers and employers navigating hundreds of applications, it’s critical to know how to optimize your resume for your next job search. Fortunately, we have some easy tips to help you out.
Make Your Resume Visually Interesting
We all know what a typical resume looks like; you open Microsoft Word and put your name and contact information at the top. You add the subheadings for your skills and education, and then you recount your prior experiences. If you’re feeling adventurous, you may also add a section for your extracurricular achievements. However, this can grow tedious for employers since they essentially spend most of their time reading similar applications repeatedly.
The best way to instantly catch the eye of a human reader is to punch up your resume’s design! Features such as colours, fonts and layout are a great addition to any document. Not a graphic designer? Don’t worry — the internet is full of ready-made templates which you just need to customize to your liking. Sites such as Canva have various free resume templates, which will surely brighten up any application.
Just be sure to not get too intense! Suppose you overdo the design of your resume. In that case, it can become too busy and become too difficult to read, which can be worse than just using an ordinary one.
Trim it Down to One Page
Speaking of confusion, we now live in an age where most online job applications use applicant tracking systems (ATS). ATS software is designed to filter through applications based on specific keywords. This design means you have to optimize your resume to primarily match the job application’s keywords rather than impress a human recruiter.
Staying concise and highlighting keywords are vital! It doesn’t matter how much experience you have or how qualified you are for the position. If the electronic reader gets confused by lengthy pages and unnecessary words, your application may be filtered out.
That’s why it’s highly recommended that the modern resume remains about one page. Use your space wisely and stick to relevant skills and experience. For instance, after a certain point in your professional career, you no longer need to dedicate a whole section of work experience to your part-time retail job in university. It takes up unnecessary space and will only further confuse the reader.
Engaging visuals also come into play here, as you can really make the most of a single page when you utilize a creative, economical layout.
Move Relevant Information to the Top
Another common tendency when creating a traditional resume is to write your prior work experience in chronological order. This makes sense from a personal summary perspective. It allows your future employers to see how your career has developed and how you’ve grown as a professional. However, from the perspective of an electronic reader or an employer skimming pages, it’s a big mistake.
Both the electronic reader and employer will scan your resume for keywords and relevant experience to gauge whether or not you’re qualified for the position. In this sense, it’s best to move all your relevant experience to the top of the page to ensure it’s the first thing people see.
Let’s say two similarly qualified candidates are applying for the same position. They have the same experience and educational background. Still, one happens to place that content higher on their resume than the other. In this situation, it’s more likely the first candidate will be called back simply because the necessary information was in a more accessible spot.
This also means it’s necessary to edit your resume based on the position you’re applying for!. Even within the same field, different jobs have different descriptions and requirements, so cater your application to suit what individual recruiters are asking for.
And that’s it!
These are three ways you can brush up your resume and optimize it for the extensive, competitive world of job hunting. Try and practice them in preparation for your next job hunt and see if they help. Best of luck!